Page 3 - Containment Wall News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> and the fuel escaped into the atmosphere and it was picked by a sensor. >> explain what the meltdown is. >> the meltdown, well that is a partial meltdown. we saw that at three mile island where we had a partial meltdown. but the meltdown was contained by the containment vessel. there are two walls in those fukiyama plants whose express purpose is to keep the molten material from leaking out into the environment. it's the last line of defense to prevent a meltdown from reaching the earth and exploding and being disbursed like what happened in chernobyl. >> we're heard some of the japanese of...

This four-hour program. thank you, sir. anding, known was more prepared for an, and for a tsunami than japan. the building code. the alert system. the early warnings. but can you prepare for potential meltdown? are they prepared for that? who knows? >> and now our next expert, from washington, dc, the former director for nonproliferation at the carnegie endocument for peace and universal compliance. thank you for joining us this morning. the pictures, the video we have been watching shows this nuclear plant with, you can see here, fires, you can see lots of smoke coming out of it. what do you ...

Point. the loss of the containment building is a very serious matter. i mean, they were trying for the past, what, 12 hours, more than that to vent radioactive steam to prevent a catastrophic breach of the week old containment building. they didn't have a catastrophic breach, they had a catastrophic loss of the containment building. the walls were blown off and roof blown off. we're not sure what the statues of the reactor core is, and the high level radioactive waste is. that pool is located outside of the containment and the containment exploded and disappeared. >> neil: when the containment...

Fact it is more than a crack in the roof of this facility. they are big holes in the walls, have been blown by that hydrogen explosion. >> does that mean with a crack to the roof but also big damage to the walls, does that mean any radiation being emitted from the damaged spent fuel rods is already just being emitted openly to the air? >> pretty much. some of it might play out on the wall to cool, and some of it might be plating out on the walls, but there are big holes that a large fraction of it could escape from. >> can the spent fuel rods at number 4 be made safe? do we know whether the da...

More fuel rods in them, but they're not necessarily kept in that russian doll style multiple containment system. they don't want to move these fuel rods far from the reactors that they come out of. they are, of course, super hot and super radioactive. you don't want to be trucking them across the country. in the reactors in trouble in japan, where do they move the fuel rods to? they move them to here, just up top. they are essentially just protected by the one external containment wall. and that external containment wall is something that we are all very familiar with looking at pictures of ri...